Overshadowed by United States President George Bush’s controversial, last-chance bid to salvage American honour in Iraq, the US is mounting a parallel military and reconstruction ”surge” in Afghanistan ahead of an anticipated Taliban spring offensive.

Not for the first time, the violence of extremists has achieved the exact opposite of what they intended. Ogun Samast, alleged to have gunned down the bridge-building ethnic Armenian Turkish journalist Hrant Dink last week, reportedly told investigators he was defending Turkey’s national honour. Instead, Turkey’s honour stands besmirched before an appalled international audience.

The prospective collapse of democracy in predominantly Sunni Muslim Bangladesh is raising concerns reaching far beyond the politically divided south Asian nation of 145-million people. A state of emergency and intervention by the army are distinct possibilities if already delayed elections fail on January 22.

In the manner of the English King Henry V (as imagined by Shakespeare), with terrible aspect of eye, George W Bush on Wednesday invited the American people to follow him once more unto the Iraqi breach. But with his leadership in unprecedented doubt, with Baghdad’s daily mayhem unabated, and with 21 500 additional soldiers heading into harm’s way, the public is evidently alarmed that their president will instead close the wall up with American dead.

Tensions between Iran and the West have rarely been greater than they are today. On the one side, President George W Bush has accused Iran of being behind the attack by Hizbullah on Israel that sparked the Lebanon war; and both the United States and Britain say Iran is bent on developing nuclear weapons. On the other, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has claimed that the Bush administration is trampling on the rights of Muslims throughout the world.

Tensions between Iran and the West have rarely been greater than they are today. On the one side, United States President George Bush has accused Iran of being behind the attack by Hezbollah on Israel that sparked the Lebanon war; and both the US and Britain say that Iran is bent on developing nuclear weapons.

Bush administration officials like to describe Iran as a country isolated from the outside world. Its outlaw government’s policies, and especially its nuclear activities, have earned it the distrust of the international community, the fear of its neighbours and, they say, the rightful label of a ”rogue state”.